Concerns over protecting our privacy while online are nothing new. Watch what you post online, we are told. Use a VPN, some say. TOR is unbreakable, say others. However, not many people tend to pay so much attention to DNS, a potentially massive and gaping great hole in your network that could easily be used against you.

Now, with the proper age of geo-blocking and streaming media well and truly upon us, more and more plucky punters are signing up for so-called smart DNS solutions. These services provide a great, hassle-free way to access content restricted to specific global regions by means of a complex web of transparent proxies. Some even provide VPN over DNS solutions for the really stubborn geo-blocked services.

What is not made particularly clear to those not familiar with the technology is that by amending your default DNS IP addresses provided to you by your ISP and adding in those from a smart DNS service, you are essentially directing all of your home network traffic over a bunch of proxy servers at a vast array of locations worldwide. These are servers you have no access to, so you cannot see how they are configured and more importantly if anything is being logged, or worse, intercepted due to the potential for so-called man in the middle attacks.

I like odd stuff. I’ve mentioned that several times. I like to look for odd stuff in strange places too. It’s where the best stuff is. If you are a regular to my little corner of the Internet you’ll know that too. But I never expected to buy a bunch of stuff that would then open up a world of, well, a world of odd.

Parallel records are nothing new. In fact they’ve been around since 1901 apparently. Essentially they are a vinyl record made up concentric grooves. The design and manufacturing process allows a parallel record to hold several different tracks on one side. What’s new about that? Well, depending on where you drop the needle at the lead-in point, the record will then latch on at a random location and begin to play. Thus you’d play a record and never know what track would be played. The design also meant that records were limited in length and thus they were really only used as novelties.

“I can’t think of a better place to spend a balmy summer’s night than the old ball yard. There’s just the green grass of the outfield, the crushed brick of the infield, and the white chalk lines that divide the men from the little boys”. Lisa Simpson makes a wonderful, and wistful, poetic articulation about America’s favourite pastime. “Lisa, honey. You’re forgetting the beer. It comes in 72-ounce tubs here”. Homer Simpson makes a blunt, if somewhat equally valid point.

Construe this for when you think of baseball video games, the Nintendo 3DS isn’t exactly the first platform that springs to mind. And, like 72oz beer, they’re not that easy to find. Especially in the west. Especially outside the USA too.

I’ve a bit of a reputation for making impulse buys. Not your typical kind of impulse buys either. By that I mean I don’t walk in to Lidl for bread and a pint of milk and come out with a pair of skis, a ham slicer, 15kg of de-icer salt and a rowing boat. I tend to go for the more obscure stuff. Odd one-off’s that appear in bungled web and auction searches. Rarities that appear on super dodgy looking but actually legit shopping websites that you know will never be that price again if the site admin cops on to it.

I’ve got previous. A penchant for vinyl. And I don’t mean a silly little Beatles 12″ with 14 wrinkles on the left corner and a follicle from Ringo’s ear hair embedded within them. I mean super bizarre, possibly naff yet super wonderful stuff that 99.9% of the global populous wouldn’t give even one nanosecond of thought about snapping up.

I tend to pick up items such as official cameras from the 1980 Olympics. Or an extremely rare Canon Super 8 timer add-on (found on a village classifieds forum in a remote outpost in the French countryside no less). Yes, I am weird. Yes I like weird things. And yes I will write about them all some day.

Yet on March 11, 2017 I made an impulse purchase that proved to have a bit more than a ‘gotta have it’ effect on me. Allow me to explain…

Stephen: Yeah, same here. I've gotta be up early in the morning, playing baseball.
Del: Oh, baseball! Yeah! No... I love it. I always watch it on Channel Four.
Rodney: You don't like baseball! You've always called it silly boys rounders!
Del: Yeah, that was before that I knew it was 'in'! Nowadays it's the sort of game that guys like uh, me and Stephen enjoy.
Stephen: How d'you mean? Guys like me and Stephen?

Silly Boys Rounders

December 25th 1989. Another traditional Christmas special of Only Fools and Horses has just aired on BBC1. I was literally a couple of days from my 10th birthday and yet now, and with fast approaching nearly 30 years having passed since that day, I still recall that gag being recited on the television screen as I struggled to muster a belly laugh amongst the vast quantities of turkey, vegetables and chocolate scoffed throughout the day. I recall it so vividly because a) the episode in question The Jolly Boys Outing is a timeless classic. Endlessly revered and in many circles touted as one of the greatest episodes of televised comedy ever. Oh and b) I chuckled hard because I knew at the time that American sports such as gridiron and baseball, and to a different extent the short lived airing of kabaddi were popular on British television network Channel 4.

“What goes better with an intense snack than an intense film? Eat this. Watch this.” uttered the late Phil Hartman to an unsuspecting UK television audience in 1993. What followed was a 40 second visual assault on the senses as Hartman instructs the ‘Golden Wonder Pot TV’ network to “hit the max”.

From within the confines of a neon, multi-coloured television studio, the fictional broadcaster attacks the unsuspecting viewers eyes with a barrage of aggressive, rapid cuts of neon computer graphics, glitches, text, 3D renders and film footage. So expeditious, and bellicose was the strobe effect from the cutting speed that reports of viewers suffering seizures flooded the Advertising Standards Agency. Golden Wonder, the company behind the Pot Noodle snack being advertised, responded by producing a second version of the same advert, only this time with the cut speed of the computer graphics slowed down in the hopes this would smooth over the furore generated at the time. The re-edit proved to be unsatisfactory to the Advertising Standards Agency and sadly the advert was canned and banned.

Should you be super old, like me, you may well remember living through those halcyon days that were the late 1980’s and early to mid 1990’s. Days of carefree and misspent youth. Days spent gaming, nights spent raving. Or in my case, nights spent playing records that I’d chosen to play, loudly, to fee-paying customers that wished to shuffle and gyrate in front of me. Awkwardly and inhibited at first, and somewhat more wackily as the evening passed and they became more inebriated.

Yes, I was a DJ, ‘spinning platters’ on the ‘wheels of steel’ of a Friday, Saturday and occasionally a Sunday night circa 1996. This continued throughout the late 1990’s and in to the early part of the 2000’s. I’d play at nightclubs both regional and national and also co-hosted a weekend show on a city pirate radio station (back when pirate radio truly was about taking over real radio waves and not simply hosting a Shoutcast server). I wrote a few tracks, simple stuff as I haven’t a note in my head, which met with reasonable acclaim and distributed on a microscopic scale. At one point, on a train home from London, and having picked up a music magazine to read on the journey, I discovered that on page 69, there I was on the new release reviews, rubbing shoulders between the Beastie Boys and David Morales. I even scored 4 out 5 stars in their review of my work!

“Alice has dreamed of owning a set of copper saucepans her entire life. Hopefully by clearing out her gaf that’s full of useless tat to gullible profiteers, who we hope are just stupid enough to make a few bids, we can fulfill Alice’s dream” wails a delightfully shrill, shit-eating Alistair Appleton on daytime TV treat Cash In The Attic.

“Neil and Jason have done great with this condemned 1 bedroom studio in Lewisham. Bought for just £15,000 at auction, we’re delighted with our guidance they’ve made a whopping £150,000 profit!” squeals rotund chubmeister Martin Roberts on lunchtime favourite Homes Under The Hammer.

Profitatting

I’m hoping you are sensing a recurring theme here. We’re in the age of profitatting (a word I just made up). An age of buying up any old video game shit and flogging it off to the highest bidder. A practice that’s as old as time itself within many trade circles, but something relatively new to the world of video games. Let me have a go at explaining what, precisely, I mean by this.

If you would like to purchase items from my personal collection, I am slowly but surely adding them to my very own shop! It is hosted on Etsy and will have more items added in the coming days and weeks. I hope you find something to plug that hole in your collection!

“My one aspiration: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward…I press on toward the goal to win.” – Philippians 3:13

When you think of good, well known gridiron video games, what immediately comes to mind? Madden? Highly likely. NCAA Football? Probably. Tecmo Bowl? Absolutely. How about 4th & Inches? Probably not. With the current American football season now in full swing and 4th & Inches a mere handful of weeks away from celebrating it’s 30th birthday, I felt it an appropriate time to revist one of the true great elders of gridiron video games.